Furthering its goal of ‘health for all’ even during the pandemic, the Integrated Health and Wellbeing (IHW) Council has partnered with Project StepOne, a non-profit volunteer-driven collective of 7000 doctors, for a shared vision and objective.
Since the beginning of lockdown and through the staged unlocks, IHW Council has made significant and sustained headway in providing scientifically-valid information to people on a host of topics under the banners of ‘Gratitude Memorial for Health Workers’, ‘Care during Coronavirus’, ‘Good Air Warriors’, and ‘India IVF Summit’, to mention a few, comprising over dozens of web-based sessions with a collective audience reach of over 5 lakh people. The collaboration with StepOne will help the IHW Council further its request for a memorial for health workers who are the frontline warriors against the pandemic, a call endorsed by ministers, lawmakers, doctors, and people at large.
Mr. Kamal Narayan, CEO, IHW Council, says, “Coronavirus is reaching the smaller cities and it is more urgent than before that people reduce going out unless unavoidable. Project StepOne is a timely intervention that will reduce the burden on the existing healthcare infrastructure and enable people to access their health needs without going out. As a premier think tank encouraging preventive and promotive healthcare, we value this association that will serve people with both COVID and non-COVID queries as well as those who need mental health support and hope to make the services of StepOne accessible to more people. We believe that this association will also help more people realize the extraordinary contribution of the medical fraternity in this fight against the pandemic and rally their support behind the IHW Council’s petition, especially in the states where they are already providing service, to build a memorial for healthcare warriors.”
Project StepOne is India’s largest group of volunteer doctors and technologists fighting COVID-19 using telemedicine, along with mental health support and non-COVID care. An initiative by Raghavendra Prasad T S, StepOne runs scalable helplines powered by thousands of volunteer doctors who connect citizens with a doctor they need on the phone. The platform brings together more than 7000 doctors who have already handled 5 million calls, provided over 4 lakh teleconsultations, conducted over 25,000 mental health counselling sessions and have been able to identify over 40,000 high-risk COVID-19 suspects. The volunteer doctors have also managed to prevent about 3.2 lakh people from getting infected.
“We are providing telemedicine services for COVID related and mental health matters and video consultation for non-COVID cases. We are active in 13 states including Chhattisgarh, Bihar, Delhi, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Pune, Nagaland, Puducherry, Odisha, Punjab, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand and have catered to over 42 Crore Indian citizens with these existing state helplines. We feel there is an urgent need to extend the services to a greater number of people and announced a National COVID Telemed Helpline, +91-9745697456, that offers inclusive and 24×7 access to Healthcare experts to citizens of India, free of cost. We are proud to be associated with a leading platform like the IHW Council and hope that with increased awareness about the services, more people will benefit from it in the coming days,” says Raghavendra Prasad T S, Founder, StepOne.
